From: Krister Walfridsson <cato@df.lth.se>
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 1996 17:32:34 +0800
To: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Subject: Re: Cryptology and knot theory?
In-Reply-To: <199606152350.TAA14182@jekyll.piermont.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.VUL.3.91.960616053537.28315A-100000@marvin.df.lth.se>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain




On Sat, 15 Jun 1996, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> I would have my doubts about how interesting the direction could get,
> since knot theory is a dead area. The classification problem was fully
> solved, and after that things got boring...

Well...  I think the theory has become much more interesting after 
the classification, because we know that our problem _can_ be solved,
and our only problem is to do it faster and to get a better understanding
for the subject (there are lots of conjectures which seems simple, but 
whose state is unknown.)
 
I agree that it doesn't look good (since most of our invariants are NP-hard)
but the vassiliev invariants might be used to approximate the other
invariants... (I do not know what has been done in such approximation
theory the last couple of years.)

   /Krister